Week7 Bradley Kitaoka Section:A04

For this week’s reading I read “The criminalization of immigration and the privatization of the immigration detention: implications for justice” by Alissa R. Ackerman and Rich Furman. In this article it talked about how immigrants have been criminalized and the privatization of prisons. For example, after 9/11 there was a major increase in the imprisonment of undocumented immigrants. In 2005 there were 300 immigration related bills brought to state legislatures and in 2009 that number jumped to 1500. These bills included schools checking the immigration status of its students, making it illegal to pick up illegal day labor workers, the ability to impound vehicles that transport illegal immigrants, and other things. The increasing number of private prisons are also a problem for immigrants. This is because many of these prisons focus on capturing illegal immigrants. And since these private prisons help make money for the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) they are essentially focusing on locking up immigrants to make more money. In addition to this the workers of these private prisons typically treat their inmates poorly because they are not trained well. This article was very interesting to me especially in learning about some of the laws that they have in certain states targeting immigrants.

Question: What could be the simplest way for America to help immigrants instead of hurt them?

References:

Ackerman, A. R. and Furman, R. (2013). The Criminalization of Immigration and the Privatization of the Immigration Detention: Implications for Justice

Photo retrieved from: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/southeast-asian-prison-deportation-pipeline_us_5a1dd48ee4b0569950233065